Customers in Phoenix, Los Angeles, New York, and Salt Lake City should all benefit from better coverage as well.

The faster connection enabled by a 4G LTE network has been a chief selling point for the carriers this year. Verizon, however, has had a distinct advantage, and has lost no opportunity to tout the breadth of its own coverage -- more than all of the other carriers combined -- alongside its network quality message. After the latest round of deployments that will be turned on Thursday, the carrier will have covered 470 cities.

AT&T, however, argues that it has a larger network running on a slower technology called HSPA+, which it and others in the industry all designate as 4G.